With increasing popularity, consumers worldwide are purchasing goods and services on credit. For many purchasers, the most convenient form of payment is a plastic card with a magnetic stripe, an embossed account number and/or a smart chip called a credit card (hereafter “card” or “cards”).
Cards may be used at service establishments (S/Es) (e.g., automated teller machines (ATM), point of sale (POS), and instances when no card is used during the transaction such as purchases over the Internet) that have entered into agreements with an Acquirer for the S/E to accept cards from cardmembers to charge purchases of goods and services or for cash access. An Acquirer may be, for example, a nonfinancial or financial entity that specializes in the marketing, installation and support of POS card acceptance at S/Es. Acquirers generally negotiate a contract with the S/E to accept a brand of cards (e.g., AMERICAN EXPRESS®, VISA®, MasterCard®, DISCOVER CARD®).
Card Issuers are typically banks and other financial organizations (e.g., Bank of America®, Citibank®, MBNA America®, Chase Manhattan Bank®) operating under the regulations of a card issuing association or entity. The cardmember enters into an agreement and establishes a card account with the Issuer. The Issuer's name generally appears on the card and cardmember's payments are typically sent to that Issuer.
Occasionally cardmembers may receive unsatisfactory goods or services from the S/E, be involved with a dispute over price with the S/E, or the S/E may have failed to comply with the regulations and/or terms of its card acceptance agreement with the Acquirer. Typically the cardmember then notifies the Issuer about the dispute with the S/E, which prompts the Issuer to begin a dispute resolution process with the Acquirer on behalf of the cardmember. Alternatively, the Issuer may begin the dispute process in the absence of any cardmember complaint, for example when the S/E fails to comply with regulations and/or terms.
In order to substantiate the dispute claim, the Issuer may first make a “retrieval request” to the Acquirer. The receipt for a cardmember's purchase or credit transaction containing the details of any transaction carried out at the S/E is called the record of charge (ROC). A retrieval request may include a request for either an original ROC, a legible reproduction of the ROC, or any other transactional documentation from the Acquirer. The documentation supplied by the Acquirer in reply to a retrieval request is called “fulfillment.”
A typical “chargeback” is a reversal of a credit transaction which is “chargedback” to the Acquirer from the Issuer. The Acquirer may refute the chargeback and process a “second presentment” to the Issuer with additional documentation. A “final chargeback” by the Issuer to the Acquirer occurs if the Issuer refutes the “second presentment” by providing additional documentation.
The aforementioned dispute handling process between cardmembers, Issuers, Acquirers and/or S/Es is largely a manual documentation gathering process. Each step, beginning with the retrieval request, includes copying, mailing or faxing documentation. The entire manual process may consume valuable employee time and resources. Furthermore, while the dispute is being settled, the charge remains pending on either the cardmembers account or on unreconciled billings.
Communication between the parties (i.e., cardmember, Issuer, Acquirer, S/E) is on-going until the dispute is settled. In the above-described known dispute processes involving non-electronic transmission of documentation, communication may only occur during normal business hours. This can be difficult due to varying time zones. Thus, there exists a need for streamlining post-transactional credit disputes by providing electronic transmission of documentation.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a credit dispute system and method that increases the efficiency of the process. More particularly, there is a need for a system and method of processing a credit dispute that allows an initiator (such as an Issuer) to begin a dispute process by, for example, initiating a retrieval request to a responder (such as an Acquirer), then allowing the responder to fulfill the request in a real-time processing environment.
Moreover, data interchange between parties can be problematic if the interchange is between disparate users and systems. For example, each party (e.g., Issuer and Acquirer) may have their own systems infrastructure which may include, for example, their own servers respectively. Alternatively, a central server may be used, but the process of multiple parties accessing the server from their own infrastructures may be inefficient, costly and/or complicated. Thus, there exists a need for a credit dispute system and method that provides a well-defined and adaptable data interchange format to facilitate communication with multiple parties, and their respective system infrastructures with minimal error.